Heaven Can Wait
Released in 1943, directed by Ernst Lubitsch
There’s one indelible scene in this movie, and it comes at the beginning. We are at the gates of hell. Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche) has come to present himself for admittance and is received by Satan (Laird Cregar) in his businessman mode – he has a desk. But before Henry can get very far another dead soul appears, a Ms. Edna Craig (Florence Bates, uncredited). Satan has been affable with Henry, but Edna seems to rub him the wrong way. When she fishes for compliments about her legs it rubs him even further (she is old, so it could be that Satan likes young legs, or maybe he doesn’t like legs at all, maybe he likes tentacles, or some nameless form of appendage which it would drive us mad to imagine) and he pushes a red button on his desk. This, we assume, is meant to send her to hell proper, but we are not prepared for the suddenness of the procedure. A trap door opens under Edna, orange light glares out and there’s a jet of smoke, and with a very real scream of anguish she’s gone. That done, Satan turns back to Henry. Henry Satan likes.
Do we like Henry? That is the essence of the film. Satan invites Henry to tell the story of his life; and that is the story we get, from soup to nuts. Henry is born in 1872, the scion of a wealthy Manhattan family, whose mansion grounds much of the film’s action. In an elegant touch, the décor of the home’s interior will shift subtly with the years, from fussy post-bellum splendor to stolid post-depression gravity. Henry’s character, however is fixed – from nearly the start we can see that he is happy-go-lucky, a charmer, that he will do a lot for love or lust, that he is responsive and impulsively caring to those he responds to (but with a cruel streak when he is left cold). It is important that these qualities be fixed, because if they were to change – if Henry were to “grow” – that would admit fault; and the film doesn’t want to admit fault – that is its challenge to the audience. We are meant to find fault, but we are also meant to suffer a little to find it.
Because Henry is a lover of women, and privileged to do what he loves, the primary episodes in his life involve women; and while he is still young he meets one particular woman. This is Martha Strable (Gene Tierney), the fiancé of Albert (Allyn Joslyn, who was the lead in the Broadway version of Arsenic and Old Lace before transitioning into supporting roles). Albert is Henry’s cousin and is literally about to marry Martha; but after a five minute courtship Henry carries off Martha in his arms. The mechanics of the seduction are a bit agonizing – circumstances keep pushing Martha and Henry together in a way that wears down her will to resist, and director Ernst Lubitsch will eventually employ a tactic borrowed from The Shop Around the Corner by having her later admit that she wanted her will to be worn down, retconning said seduction into a mutual coupling.
Let’s return for a moment to the damned Edna, and to Henry’s cruel streak. Much of Heaven is poised between cruelty and humor, and what is meant to mitigate the cruelty and allow it to be transformed into humor is that the bad things only happen to low-class people - class here referring not to social class but to quality of character. Edna is tacky, and therefore can burn for eternity. Albert is a goody two-shoes, and therefore can have his heart broken and his life presumably ruined. It is interesting here to pair Lubitsch with Ophüls. Both were interested in the dramatic and moral qualities of the vanished, hyper-graduated class systems of pre-war Europe. But while Ophüls wanted to recreate that lost world on screen; Lubitsch wanted in his work to refashion it into a more natural and just aristocracy, in which character rather than birth could grant primacy. And what is character to Lubitsch? It is elegance and charm first, and morality second - or third, or more as a thing to wistfully aspire to. In this sense Heaven is an explication of the moral principles of a Lubitschian caste system. As such, the villains are those who would base their ethics on differing principles - Kansans in particular are tried and found wanting (although, because vilification is neither elegant nor charming, even Kansans are allowed to have their nuances).
Once Henry and Martha are paired off, the rest of the film deals with infidelity. Henry is not fidel. How exactly he is not fidel we are never told. His activities are only hinted at, which leads to an interesting ethical question: is it in some cases better, for the clarity of our moral judgments, to know the general class of an offense, but not its specifics? Maybe! In any case, Martha briefly leaves Henry because of his unspecified wanderings, but he wins her back because he is so charming, so responsive to her. Another ethical question: how should we judge a charming rogue, who lies and cheats, but whose force of personality is so strong that he can make up for it all, in consequentialist terms, with a wink and a smile? Coming to her own conclusions, Martha returns, and there are many years of happiness, their passage indicated by a montage of birthday cakes (the film is based on a Hungarian play called Birthday) - each cake dotted with more candles than the last, even as the attempts to blow the candles out grow feebler – until she complains of dizzy spells, at which point we know she’s a goner.
The film continues after her death with a bit of an odd, coasting feeling, familiar from biopics, where things need to happen just because a life is being recorded and you can’t record a life without things happening. We see Henry’s loss and sadness at the death of his wife - although again this is not a deepening of his character; we would not have expected less of him. There is also one final scene of cruelty, really the most shocking – Henry, dreaming of death personified as an attractive woman, wakes up to find himself attended by an unattractive (in the world of the film) nurse; he snaps at her for not being more beautiful. It sours us because the nurse has displayed no character at all, only shown her face; and thus we suspect that the Lubitschian system may have more to do with privilege of birth than was previously let on. Soon after being insulted, the nurse is replaced by a more attractive (in the world of the film) attendant; and snip snip go the scissors of the fates, and Henry goes down to Satan’s antechamber.
What should we, the audience, conclude about Henry from all this? Satan at least is not particularly inclined to let him in. Rather, he says, Henry should head upwards. Not that he should expect entrance to heaven’s more amenable neighborhoods. Instead Henry will be allowed to cool his heels in a kind of soft limbo, until such time as his sins are expatiated. He will be punished, that is, but the punishment will be calibrated to fit the crime. To which a stolid, characterless Kansan might respond, that sounds reasonable.
NOTES
Laird Cregar was regularly cast as the heavy; before he played Satan in Heaven Can Wait he played Jack the Ripper in The Lodger. He was extremely large, and had a John Goodmanesque presence, a sense of being avuncular but only up to a quite specific point, and that past that point he might beat you to death. As Satan he wears red makeup and a waxed mustache. The visible bags under his eyes make him look a little appalled at the gravity of his responsibilities. The gap between his front teeth is probably the film’s high point. Cregar died young, during a crash diet meant to help him land work; Vincent Price delivered his eulogy.
The texture of this film is a mirror of Henry’s personality, hyper-responsive to the viewer, eager to give pleasure. The soundtrack is old Hollywood, largely through composed, always quick to comment on, elaborate on, playfully undercut the action on the screen. Colors are deployed in phalanxes; or in brilliant dabs (as with Gene Tierney’s blue eyes). The technicolor birthday cake montage is nearly assaultive.
The gates of hell set is striking and effective, and very clearly a set – I mean, we are supposed to see it as a set, and admire it as such. I don’t think there is a modern analogue. Nowadays, if we are shown a fictional location the point is to show us what it would really look like, if it existed. The idea of the location might be clearly non-realistic – like say the land of the dead in Pixar’s Coco. But we aren’t meant to appreciate the clever falsity of what we’re being shown.
This film came out in 1944, and I was surprised that a sex manual is an important part of the plot. The book is called How to Please Your Husband, and the cover shows a woman peeking out from behind a set of bed curtains. I’m certain the audience would have known what it was (more so than a modern audience, since these kinds of manuals have gone out of style). The book is part of Henry and Martha’s meet cute; later, after she dies, he pulls it off the shelf by accident, and this reminder of her sends him into a melancholy reverie.
